Marin Marais (1656–1728) besides being Louis XIV’s court musician, was a prolific composer. He composed both operas, certain of which were very successful, instrumental music and some (lost) religious vocal music. As a viol player he published five books which include some of the most interesting and beautiful music for the viol. These five books also are chock full of performance instructions both for the left hand as well as the bow hand. They are a gold mine for viol players and are as relevant to teaching a musician good technique on the viol nowadays as they were when originally printed in the late seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century.
2011 DGG released a spectacular 10-CD anthology on Archiv Produktion with Ensemble Plus Ultra (EPU), the finest British early music singers (Early Music Today), commemorating the 400th anniversary of Tomas de Victoria s death. This box won a Gramophone award.
This recording charts a path through the sonatas for violin and basso continuo composed by eight composers born in Italy, the epicentre of the genre’s experimentation at the time. Most of these composers were also violin virtuosos, true explorers and connoisseurs of their instrument, and several enjoyed an international career that led them to publish beyond the Alps. One of the recording’s key unifying elements is the exploration of the D minor key, with the only exception of two sonatas in the neighboring D major and A major keys, three particularly idiomatic tonalities that favor the instrument’s natural resonance.
The solo pieces by Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe presented here were written around 1690 and are part of a manuscript included in the archives of the municipal library in Tournus, Burgundy. Hence its name: the ‘Tournus Manuscript’. The first modern edition of the manuscript was published in 2013 by Edition Güntersberg, prepared by Herausgegeben von Günter and Leonore von Zadow. Until then, only a facsimile edition by Minkoff had been published, one which is long since out of print. I came across the pieces quite by accident while searching through the music shops that populate the Rue de Rome in Paris.